State of the art whole body image scanning systems are often utilized in diagnosing a variety of medical ailments from medical scans such as computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance (MR), positron emission tomography-computed tomography (PET/CT), single photon emission-computed tomography (SPECT/CT), and PET/MRI, to name just few. Many times patient bone assessment is required during diagnostic evaluation from such medical scans which can be a time consuming task given that current clinical practices require the reading of multiplanar rendering (MPR) planes in a sequential fashion.
Further, bone assessment from such medical scans can be error prone due to the inherent complexity of human bone shapes and the associated twisted geometry, and that bone intensity (including marrow) varies across individual patients having different bone anomalies (e.g., cancer metastasis, simple fractures, and complex fractures from acute/trauma). This complexity is exacerbated when functional imaging modality (e.g., PET/CT or SPECT/CT or PET/MRI) is utilized for acquiring whole body scans in an effort to discover so-called “hot spots” located throughout the human body.
In addition to the complexity introduced by the nature of human bones and associated skeleton structure, it can also be non-intuitive for the user (e.g., medical technician or medical doctor) to interact with the medical scan from the aforementioned systems. Further, difficulties may arise in navigating the medical image volume itself, marking findings from the image scan and/or drawing bone centerlines. For example, the medical scan generated may be a 3D CT volume which provides a large amount of data that is difficult and tedious for such medical professionals to visualize, examine in an efficient manner, and perform various diagnostic operations.
Existing techniques directed to improving the visualization of ribs in, for example, CT volumes in 3D medical image volumes and to unfold the rib cage into a 2D image are described in U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2013/0070996, “Method and System for Up-Vector Detection for Ribs in Computed Tomography Volumes”, D. Liu et al., published on Mar. 21, 2013 (hereinafter “Liu”), and U.S. Pat. No. 7,627,159, “2D Visualization for Rib Analysis”, A. Kiraly et al., issued on Dec. 1, 2009 (hereinafter “Kiraly”), each of which is hereby incorporated by reference for all purposes. These techniques allow for the unfolding of the 3D rib cage image into a 2D image to improve examination time and reduce ambiguity in interpreting the CT data of the ribs.
A need exists for an improved technique of unfolding and visualizing the full human skeleton from a medical scan and interacting with the image scan for full body bone reading.